I had an issue today where I needed to restore a VM as it wouldn’t boot. In this instance the customer was using storage level snapshots of the Nimble datastore, where the virtual machine files were stored.
I initially attempted to clone the datastore from snapshot in the Nimble management console, but after connecting the new datastore to the Hyper-V host I was trying to copy the old VM files to, I realised that the disk still had the attributes of a clustered disk and so I couldn’t just bring it online to copy the files out. For whatever reason I couldn’t bring the disk into the cluster either. Rather than work that out I thought surely this has been considered before and should be a lot easier! (Storage isn’t a strong point)
After a quick search it turns out it this has been considered and I just needed to run a fairly simple command – “Invoke-CloneNimVolume”
The HPE article explaining said command can be found here: https://infosight.hpe.com/InfoSight/media/cms/active/public/pubs_Windows_Integration_Guide_NWT_5_0_0.whz/wga1485556107780.html
There are loads of different scenario’s where you may want to copy the file to different locations, in my case I just wanted the disk connected to the host so I could grab the VM files, which led me to the below section.
Before you run this command, if you haven’t ran “Set-NWTConfiguration” as the logged in user before, you will need to do so. You simply need to type the above followed by the management IP address on the Nimble device, press enter, enter your credentials and it should authenticate to the device.
Reference: https://infosight.hpe.com/InfoSight/media/cms/active/public/pubs_Windows_Integration_Guide_NWT_5_0_0.whz/bwr1485553031405.html
Once you’ve done the above you can run Invoke-CloneNimVolume -NimbleVolumeName **NameOfYourVolume** -SnapshotName **NameOfYourSnapshot**
You’ll need to provide the name of the volume and the snapshot you’d like to clone, wait a few moments and your disk is attached to the server you ran it from. Go to disk management and assign the disk a letter and you can browse to the required files, copy them out, test, then offline the new volume in the Nimble management console and delete it. Much easier!